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The Engagement
OONA, the bride-to-be, waits in white at Blackfriars station, where David exits for work, holding a sign that reads “David?” The final letter in the surveillance-love-story series Dear David, this performance closes a correspondence begun in 2019 between OONA and David, the TfL CCTV Data Manager who serves as the proxy through which she addresses the surveillance state. In person, inside the network he manages, she asks him to marry her, making their relationship official. For years OONA has been tracked, counted and recorded under a contract she never signed, one that treats presence as assent. The sign, a single name followed by a question mark, reverses that arrangement. The state takes consent by default. OONA asks, and makes David answer for the system he stands in for. The proposal does not offer consent so much as expose the contract already in force. OONA considers herself wed to surveillance long before the ceremony, and marriage, the original contract, is the form that makes its terms visible and speakable. The bridal white and the handwritten sign borrow the language of arrivals and reunions, staging romantic spectacle inside an apparatus that has never needed her yes. A love letter delivered not by post or by feed but in public, in plain sight of the network that made the relationship possible, the work collapses the distance between observer and observed and asks what consent can mean inside a bond one never chose.
